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"Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright"- Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption. This blog is from one such bird who couldn't be caged by organizations who mandate scripted software testing. Pradeep Soundararajan welcomes you to this blog and wishes you a good time here and even otherwise.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Why Testing failed in a freshers mind ?

Hi Reader,You go meet a fresher and tell him "Hi , I am ____ , from an MNC and I have two kind of jobs and I shall take you whatever you are interested in" and also tell him "What would you prefer Development or Testing"Should I write the most obvious answer ?I was very keen on researching this and my mentor told me "Pradeep , Testing is more of a forced profession/job for a fresher , Rarely a person would come up and say that he/she wants to do testing and I am not sure if that person really has a passion to test in his/her heart"I felt it true , when I was a fresher and went for an interview , the manager there told me "I can offer you testing and is it OK?" , without knowing what it is I did accept and I also crossed a stage where I started looking at development jobs but today is a day where I would never do that , not that I dont like development but just that I have started to like testing a lot more each day !__ Why Testing failed in a freshers mind ? ___Shall I blame it on BIG companies like Microsoft , Google ....I think I need to ( a certain extent ?) and am not sorry for that , everyone entering in this industry dreams of entering companies like Microsoft , Google , Yahoo , Adobe , Cisco and so on ....What do they do _ 1?They want the best coders and they dont want their competitors to grab the best ones and hence organize a coding contest like .. Google India Code Jam which gets great visibility to the students and professionals.What can they do _ 1?Well , good that you have tough questions that people who are real good designers and coders can crack it and why don't they have a parallel Testing contest where people are asked to Test the code those Great Coders wrote ? Is it that they have so good coders whose code need not be tested. Even to grant them a prize as champion or winner , someone from the team has to test it , isnt it true.What do they do _ 2 ?Take up any written test by any company (atleast in India ) for a fresher. Not a single question about testing , Why ? Testing comes under a part of the CS/IT curriculum and why not ? Finally some of the people who clear the test having a passion for development are forced into testing ultimately resulting in either attrition after an year of experience or product quality at stake due to lack of interest.What can they do _ 2 ?They being aware that they need some freshers for Testing too can make an effort to give a different written test for people who want to enter testing.They can identify the talent people have in testing a product or application. Simply speaking the truth a company can get better testers than their competitors by doing so and moreover a better output , product quality improving , less time spent on managing attrition.What do they do _ 3 ?Money ! is a vital factor for most or I should be more frank here , for everyone. When I joined as a fresher and I was into testing , I got only 1/4th of what a fresher cum developer got in the same company. Wait ! This doesnt happen everywhere but still it does happen , right ? Even today I am paid less than a developer of my similar skill set or experience but without any guilt all companies put up saying "they are an equal opportunity employer and they dont differentiate" , aren't they ?What can they do _ 3 ?There can be a marginal difference for Developers and Testers but 1/4th is not at all good and if you call that an equal opportunity , I doubt your Math skills and so your development skills too.When you hire a fresher , do not differentiate , me and my friend studied in the same class and got the same score and in the same company and he getting more than me just because I am a tester is stupid ! If you dont accept , check guiltometer , it will show its max.What do you ( freshers ) do ?Have you ever seen a fresher doing their final year project on testing ? Never ! why ? Freshers too are responsible for being a bit narrow minded and this factor cannot be given so much weight-age as usually freshers are naive , I was naive , you were naive. I dont want matured replies as "No , I wasn't" !What can you ( freshers ) do ?Do I need to tell it after you have read so much ?__ End of __ Why Testing failed in a freshers mind ? ___

"Fresh minds are ignited minds , do not differentiate whether petrol ignited them or diesel"

Now-a-days Testing is picking up, but, still it is not an independent entity like Development, the irony is, it relies on Development[Improper Development].

So, a fresher with a fresh mind thinks of doing something new rather than playing with a corrupted application. Also, there is a widespread thought that Testing has no growth and you need to write Test Cases most of the time which will never work when the app is ready, and so on.

Eventhough I can reply to anybody who ask me in which area you are working, as Testing, many testers, are not so comfortable to tell that, I have seen in so many cases.

So, more and more innovations in Testing and involvement of Testers in Requirements Development and Analysis and an at par salary (obviously, with Programmers) may make it a great area to work on and hopefully, more freshers may atleast give it a thought...

This is a really good eye-opener for testers and they are justified in their fears because they too need some motivation and that should come in the form of innovation.

Answers for What can you do_1?

The book "The Google Story" describes how Google tested its frontpage by conducting lots of competitions in Universities and how students found out lot of flaws in the loading of the front page. So I guess Google has its own innovations in development and in testing ....

Testing here usually only means BlackBox testing. Nobody even thinks a tester too can be fully in charge of code. A tester too can search all code paths intelligently and find out some really marvelous (from the tester's perspective) exceptions.Some companies given in this blog do conduct a Bug Bash day for testers who find out excellent rare exceptions that could occur through code walk throughs and not through black box.

It is truly a sad state of affairs that testers are considered to be dumb and that I guess is only in India??? Or I maybe wrong??That is only because we don't give or do not want to give more emphasis on white box testing or any sort of "intelligent testing".

Gr8 work pal! The point you have raised in this blog is more than valid. I guess, a lot of freshers need to be sure about what they want as a career. For that, there is a requirement of focus not just among freshers but also among the instituions of learning. If a student is unaware of an option such as testing, then why or how will he/she opt for it as a career? Lets hope Blogs like this will create more awareness among budding testers...and may not a gifter tester be sacrificed at the altar of development due to ignorance.

Good post!But, I still think it’s not really with a fresh engineering grad to understand what testing is. Somehow, I think the problem lies with the course structure of the CS/IT streams in colleges, where practically no working experience in testing is granted. Do we really have lab sessions where a standard Yahoo mail application would be thrown at the students challenging them to break it and see how many of them are able to do it? Perhaps, they need to discover and appreciate their own testing skills. One theoretical course in testing can never help in generating awareness / interest.

Think, what it would have been like if there were just “theoretical” course on C++ / Java without any programming projects or applications development.

I also, disagree that hiring a fresher for testing who is looking for a development profile is such a bad idea. I myself wanted to be a developer as a fresher, forced into testing by circumstances, started to like the profile and there came a state where I was offered a development profile by the PM and I smiled and said “No, thanks. I am cool with testing”. So, it’s really the awareness that is lacking!

Lame excuse for landing up in testing and glorifying testing. I am a tester myself, but it doesn't make justice what I have learnt and known. Development is an art by itself, where creativity is at its most, but I agree we got Google.com/codes for that hehe. anyways for some Bread n butter is in testing for others it is in dev. both r equal. development requires stuff in ur grey matter. adios

50-60% of the time testers do black box testing.It demands intelligence but you will not gain as much technical knowledge as your friend gains as a developer and regression testing makes things worse. so it leads to dissatisfaction for a fresher who comes out with lot of enthu to learn new things. so they stop recommending the same to their juniors.

Wokay guys every comment is justifiable, but how many organizations has openings in Testing for freshers. It is the job openings which most of the people would be interested in. For a fresher and if hes not selected in campus for any company then he'll be in search of medium sized company's which focuses only towards development more rather than testing. I think this is one of the reason they want to go for development and take some quick course so that they land up in a organization. Correct me if am wrong coz I have not seen much friends or people who were offered testing in the beginning....

Correct me if am wrong coz I have not seen much friends or people who were offered testing in the beginning....

I think you need correction. Today there are a number of testing services oriented companies looking for fresh trainee testers. I hired 4 of them in the last 6 months and I know of people and organizations who hired many.

The things have changed but it is not about the "opening" but about the mindset.

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